NASA audio of what a black hole sounds like is eerily unsettling

Sonification is the translation of astronomical data into sound. This sonification translates the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. There is a popular misconception that there is no sound in space because most of the space is a vacuum, with no medium for sound waves to travel through.

But galaxy clusters enveloping thousands of galaxies within it often have large amounts of sound, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel. In the sonification of Perseus, the sound waves previously identified by astronomers were extracted in radial directions (outwards from the centre). After extraction, the signals were synthesised into the range of human hearing by scaling them up to 58 octaves above their actual pitch. The video above displays a radar-like scan that illustrates how the sound is emitted in different directions as you listen to it.

But perhaps not all black holes sound as eery as that one. Apart from the sonification of the black hole in the Perseus cluster, NASA also released a sonification of another famous black hole. According to the space agency, the black hole in Messier 87 (M87) gained celebrity status after the first release of data from the Vent Horizon Telescope project in 2019.

This new sonification does not feature data from the project and instead uses data from other telescopes that observed M87. The three panels in the video contain images of M87 translated from X0ray data from Chandra, optical light from Hubble and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile respectively. Both these audios were released for black hole week in May this year.